"In the terminology of linguistics, comprehension of the solution must precede production. That is to say, the learner must be able to recognize a solution to a particular class of problems before he is himself able to produce the steps leading to it without assistance" (Wood, Bruner, & Ross 90).
I've spent most of my prosem prep time puzzling through this quotation from this week's reading. I want to respond positively, but to be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand the implications of this passage. Initially, I took it to mean that students must be able to understand a solution to a problem before they can adequately reproduce it without my assistance. Translating this into terms comparable with Rhet 103 (or 105), I take this to mean that students cannot successfully write an observation essay if they cannot comprehend the steps necessary to completing that goal. This might become helpful to me if, say, a particular group is struggling to identify a productive research question embedded in their observations. If I were to point out a particular observation to them -- one that I know will lead to an interesting topic -- and encourage them to focus on it, my actions would only be productive if they understood the process well enough to see why I chose that detail for them to focus on. This kind of scaffolding I can certainly support. (pun!)
However, this attitude is somewhat at odds with Zach's post, which emphasizes the importance of independence and potential failure in the college learning process. Ideally, scaffolding provides students a structure that enables them to make sense of their mistakes when they fail; wouldn't instruction without this sense of escalating skill-building create an environment where failure results not in learning but in blinding frustration? Failure is an integral part of the learning process, and this failure has to occur in a setting that's been constructed to make sense of that failure.
I wonder how much of this is really, truly "scaffolding," or if there's even a difference between this vague support structure I describe here and what is called "instructional design." Is it somewhere on the continuum between a carefully-constructed syllabus that builds skills and the primarily K-8 phenomenon differentiated instruction?
While I think differentiated instruction is feasible and successful in primary school I would have to argue that it isn't in a college setting. The idea of identifying skill levels and then differentiating assignments for 19 students alone makes it sound like too much work for a T.A. who also has other course work to attend to. Not to mention trying to maintain a semblance of a social life. (That may come off as selfish but I'm okay with it because as L'Oréal says "You're [I'm] worth it".
ReplyDeleteI think this issue--the ability to recognize solutions coming before the ability to (re)produce them--gets considerably more complicated (as Sara points out)when we move from toddlers with blocks to teenagers with fieldnotes. Many of my students are at a point where they can recognize a bad research question and explain why it wouldn't work--"we could just look it up"--but they aren't always able to recognize a good one when they see it modeled (I suspect this may be partly due to their ambivalence about approaching questions they will actually have to wrestle with).
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